October 2016

Two essays on race. This month produced two notable essays dealing with race. One was notable
for dishonesty and incoherence; the other for its clarity and straightforward good sense.

The dishonesty and incoherence was of course in defense of the No Such Thing As Race dogma, hereinunder NOSTAR.

NOSTAR is a key axiom in our state ideology. It is, however, so contrary to everyday experience, common sense, and elementary biology that media
outlets feel obliged to publish stern affirmations of it from time to time, rather as state newspapers in communist countries used to publish long editorials,
for use in study sessions by the Party faithful, affirming the infallibility of Marxist-Leninism.

(The outstanding exhibit here, according to sinologist
Simon Leys, was an editorial in the Peking
People's Daily at the time of the Lin Biao affair in 1971, instructing readers that
extreme leftism was a right-wing deviation.)

So here was science journalist Faye Flam laying down the Party line at Bloomberg News, October 3rd.

Race is perhaps the worst idea ever to come out of science.
[Science's Biggest Blunder by Faye Flam; Bloomberg News,
October 3rd 2016.]

"We never use the term 'race,'" said Harvard geneticist Swapan Mallick, an author on one of the papers revealing the latest
DNA-based human story.

So what term do Dr Mallick and his colleagues use when discussing local common-ancestry variations within a species? If "race"
was good enough for Darwin, why isn't it good enough for
him?

"We're all part of the tapestry of humanity, and it's interesting to see how we got where we are."

Indeed we are, and indeed it is. It is equally true, though, that we are all part of the tapestry of the genus
Homo, of the family
Hominidae, of the order Primates, of
the class Mammalia, of the
the phylum Chordata, of the
Animal Kingdom. All
of that is pretty interesting, too. What's your point?

One of the world's most prominent American scientists of the mid-1800s, Samuel Morton, collected skulls from all over the world and
attempted to demonstrate that those of European ancestry had the world's biggest heads and were, so he claimed, intellectually superior.

Scientists subsequently realized that Morton was wrong — about whose heads were biggest and the connection between head size
and intelligence.

Leaving aside the fact that Morton was not much interested in such a connection, brain size (which correlates with head size)
does correlate with intelligence. [Neuroanatomical Correlates of Intelligence by E.
Luders, K.K. Narr, P.M. Thompson, and A.W. Toga; National Institutes of Health, 2009.]

[Geneticist Joseph] Graves sometimes quizzes his students by showing them an
image of a man and asking them to guess where he comes from. It appears to show someone most Americans would identify as a black man, and Graves says people
assume he's from Africa or an African American community in the U.S. But he's from the Solomon Islands, which are in the South Pacific.

Are there really people who don't know this sort of thing? Fifty years ago, in then-wellnigh-monoracial England, I attended classes at University
College, London with a young man whose skin was black. He was from Burma. (I recall his name as Man Man Tin, although the internet records no trace of such a
person. In those easy-going days, with no offense intended or taken — he was a cheerful and sociable fellow — we gave him the nickname
Rin Tin Tin. That would have gotten us
permanently rusticated nowadays.)

Given the loose nature of the movement [i.e. the Alt Right], there are people who consider themselves "Alt Right" but who
disagree on one or more of these points — except one. The entire Alt Right is united in contempt for the idea that race is only a "social
construct." This is an idea that is so wrong and stupid that only very intelligent people can convince themselves it is true.

Race is a biological fact. Does anyone think that the differences between Danes and Pygmies are a sociological illusion? …

There are countless race differences in such things as skull structure, twinning rates, and susceptibility to disease. It is even possible to tell a person's
race from the varieties of bacteria that live in his mouth!

Human races have been evolving separately for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, and evolution has marked their temperaments and mental abilities just as it
has their physical characteristics. [What is the Alt Right? by Jared
Taylor; American Renaissance, October 11 2016.]

Ah, the sweet clear wine of truth!

Slow day at the Pentagon. The other zone of our social life in which state ideologues demand
that we pretend to believe preposterous things is of course sex — or, as we are now supposed to say, "gender."

Most of the preposterous things they want us to pretend to believe are in aid of an assault on traditional concepts of manliness. It is therefore
not surprising that a key target of the No Such Thing As Sex (NOSTAS) preposterentsia is the military.

A transgender Service member has expressed privacy concerns regarding the open bay shower configuration. Similarly, several other non-transgender Service
members have expressed discomfort when showering in these facilities with individuals who have different genitalia.

Key takeaway(s)

This scenario illustrates the importance of open lines of communication between the Service member and the commander. It also depicts steps a commander may
take to permit privacy, based on Service policy.

Service member responsibilities

If you have any concerns about privacy in an open bay shower setting, you should discuss this with your chain of command.

Consider altering your shower hours.

Commander responsibilities

You may employ reasonable accommodations when/if you have a Service member who voices concerns about privacy. This should be done with the intent of avoiding
any stigmatizing impact to any Service member. If permitted by Service policies, some of these steps may include:

Oh, and if you're wondering what an SCCC is, it's a Service Central Coordination Cell: basically an email address to which you can send queries
about policy in your service.

The SCCC e-address for the Army is usarmy.pentagon.hqda-dcs-g-1.mbx.sccc@mail.mil. If you want to send frivolous or spoof
questions to the Army, use that address. Don't worry that you may be wasting their time; to judge by that 72-page handbook they've just put out on
servicepersons confused about their sex, time is a thing they have plenty of in today's military.

Another day, another cilop. On a related theme (I guess), Greg Cochran mused on how things
might be if there were more than two human sexes.

Many species have several different kinds of males (a few have different kinds of females as well). For example, a lizard species in
California has three different kinds of males — aggressive orange-throated guys that successfully dominate blue males, sneaky yellow guys that get
past orange males guarding a big territory, and blue mate-guarding males (that are also cooperative — possibly a green-beard gene) that successful
guard females from sneaky yellows. The population frequencies oscillate: scissors, paper, rock.
[The Third Sex by Greg Cochran; West Hunter blog, October 26th 2016.]

My better half works in Medical Billing, arguing over the phone all day long with doctors, hospitals, patients, and insurance companies.

The other day she reported having dealt with a radiologist named Kwak — Dr Kwak. My lady is unfailingly truthful, so I did not doubt
her story, but I was curious to see that Dr Kwak looks like, so I Googled him.

Sure enough, there he is: No Bong
Kwak, MD — Specialty: Diagnostic Radiology. No picture, though. Googling further, I find that Kwak is a not-uncommon Korean
family name.

I am sure that the Kwaks are a proud and noble lineage, and that Dr Kwak discharges his radiological duties at the highest standards of
professionalism. And yes, I know it's childish to make fun of people's names, which after all they can't help. For all I know to the contrary,
"Derbyshire" sounds screamingly funny to Korean ears. If so, I do not begrudge them their mirth. Still … Dr Kwak?

And while we are at the intersection of October with names Korean, let's pause in respectful silence for a moment to remember the South Korean
Secretary of State murdered by the Norks in the
Rangoon bombing of October 1983: Lee Bum Suk.

Borjas no bore. October 20th I went to an event organized by the Center for Immigration
Studies to hear Professor George Borjas present his new book,
We
Wanted Workers. Borjas explains the title in his Introduction:

Reflecting on the European experience with the millions of guest workers [from the 1950s onwards], the Swiss playwright and novelist Max
Frisch made perhaps the single most insightful observation about immigration when he quipped: "We wanted workers, but we got people
instead."

Borjas is a lively and engaging speaker. I bought a copy of his book, and stood on line to have him sign it. When I got to him, he immediately
recognized me from a chance encounter eight years ago, which I had completely forgotten.

That was of course embarrassing, with a line of seconday emotions coming along behind the embarrassment: gratification (How nice that a bigfoot
researcher, a Harvard professor, remembers me after so many years!); annoyance (If he can remember an obscure opinionator, why can't I remember a serious
and important scholar, working in a field that I often write about?); to anxiety (Am I losing my marbles? He's only five years younger than
me …).

I recommend the book in any case; and I further recommend Borjas in person, if you get a chance to see him speak. I only regret that he is, to
borrow Dr Johnson's self-description, "a retired and uncourtly scholar," with
no taste at all — with, in fact, I think, a strong dis-taste — for political contention.

Borjas lays out a solid, factual, quantitative basis for the kinds of arguments we make here, with gentlemanly good humor and scholarly rigor. I'd
love to see him make his case in argument with the open borders shills, on TV talking-head shows or the campaign trail … but that's not his
choice.

All strength to Prof Borjas anyway, and all success to his new book.

Galaxies like grains of sand. For the longest time I carried around in my head the easy
thumbnail tally
of the cosmos: there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and a hundred billion
galaxies in the observable universe.

That second hundred billion crept up to two hundred billion when I wasn't looking; and now suddenly it's increased tenfold.

The scale of the universe, already unfathomable, just became even more so: There are about 10 times as many galaxies as previously
thought.

That's just the observable universe, mind: the one little bubble of objects whose emitted light has reached us since the Big Bang 13.8
billion years ago. The whole shebang is much bigger. It may in fact be infinite: There is an argument for this in Chapter Five of Max Tegmark's
Our
Mathematical Universe.

There's a downside and an upside to knowing stuff like this.

The downside is of course that it further dethrones us. It is only within living
memory that we have known there are any other galaxies besides our own, let alone two trillion of the suckers. Not very long before
that — a mere handful of generations — our little ball of rock was assumed to be the principal place in the cosmos, and its
affairs the primary interest of the Creator.

The upside is that our consciousness, our civilization, our accomplishments seem all the more astonishing as it becomes more and more probable
that there are no others like them anywhere, or at least anywhere within several billion trillion miles.

The arguments for this cosmic exceptionalism go back at least as far as Michael Hart's 1975 paper
An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth. Tegmark recycles them briefly
in the last chapter of his book. (He is out at the most skeptical end of the spectrum for belief in extraterrestrial intelligence: "I've just argued that
we're probably the most intelligent life-form in our entire universe.") British science journalist John Gribbin wrote
an
entire book arguing the skeptical case.

So we are utterly insignificant, but at the same time fantastically unique. There's something to meditate on, a hundred years on from
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which opened the way to serious, informed
speculation about these tremendous matters.

This is to do with my property's standalone garage. The garage has a loft. For our first 24 years in this house, we paid no attention to the
garage loft. It was a dark, filthy place, clogged with junk from previous homeowners going back to the 1940s.

It didn't even have a floor, only some random planks thrown
across the joists. Nor was there any ceiling. If you went up
there — there
was a crude, rotting wooden access ladder from below — you risked having your scalp ripped open by roofers' nails. It seems to be a cardinal rule
of roofing to use nails two inches longer than necessary when fixing the roof tiles in place.

As the main house silted up with accumulated stuff, though, I began
looking for extra storage space. And there it was: a nice unused space, twenty feet square, crammed with the junk of strangers long since passed on to their
celestial rewards.

I cleaned it out. I installed a proper pull-down access ladder. I laid
a proper floor. I hauled up tremendous 8'×4' panels of drywall and screwed them to the roof beams. I put in windows at each end.

Then, to seal up the seams between panels and hide the screw holes, you have to
spackle that drywall.

It's a tiresome business. You can learn the essentials from YouTube; but the instructors all disagree with each other. This one says to use
fiber tape on the joints; that one says no, fiber tape is for pros, stick with paper tape. This one wets the paper tape, this one doesn't. This one says to
spread the joint compound like this; that one says to spread it like that; a third one says to spread it like that but with a turn
of the wrist thus. This one uses
a
special trowel for inside corners; that one says no, just do one wall, let it dry, then do the other. I was getting flashbacks to
my time in Ed School amid those endless tiresome arguments about the best
way to teach math.

I made all the mistakes amateurs make: used too much mud and ended up sanding three quarters of it off, etc., etc. Still, when I'd finished it
didn't look bad. I called in my neighbor Charlie to do site inspection. Charlie worked for years in construction. He is a scrupulously truthful man (and a
Trump supporter!) After looking over my spackling he declared it "Not bad."

Not bad! That was my warm happy glow of the month right there. Bob Dylan is welcome to his
Nobel Prize: I'll take "Not bad" from Charlie.

The premise of the show is that in the late Cold War years of the 1980s, the U.S.S.R. had agents deep imbedded in American life, living as
ordinary suburban American couples with kids, but on call to carry out espionage missions. Its psychological appeal is to the fantasy we all nurse, from
early childhood onward, of living a secret life of excitement and danger while keeping up an outward mask of humdrum social normality.

The plotting and characterization is very good, with a narrative "pull" that keeps you wanting to rent the next clutch of episodes. The
storylines teeter on the edge of absurdity without ever quite falling over into the void.

Unfortunately I find that I am now in love with Annet Mahendru. When I confessed
this to Mrs Derbyshire, she counter-confessed that she is in love with Noah Emmerich. The
balance of domestic affections thus remains undisturbed, and we continue to watch The Americans with guiltless pleasure.

Math Corner. The number three doesn't get the respect it deserves, in my opinion.

Two is all over. We inhabit a universe of pairs: positive and negative, up and down, male and female, liberal and conservative, …
there's no end to the twos.

Three has less of a public profile. Threeness doesn't have the deep, fundamental quality of twoness.

Not that three is altogether neglected. The Christian god is tripartite; heroes in fairy-tales are granted three wishes; and no-one thinks ill
of underwear manufacturers marketing their products as small, medium, and large.

Patriots of many nations celebrate the fact of their flag having three colors. The French actually
name their flag for this feature, which keys to the three ideals of the Revolution: liberty,
fraternity, equity. English children used to be taught to sing: "Red, white, and blue / What does
it mean to you / …," although I suppose this would be considered a racist outrage nowadays.

In math, one of the most striking objects in elementary Measure Theory (dealing with the lengths, areas, volumes, etc. of mathematical figures) is
Cantor's set, which has uncountably many points in it (i.e. too many to match off
one-one with the counting numbers 1, 2, 3, …) yet has measure zero. Cantor's set is arrived at by repeated division of a line segment into three
parts; it is best grasped via
ternary (base 3) notation.

There is a dark, negative side to threeness, though. Three is often used to slight and marginalize: third-rate, three's a crowd, third arm
inspection (ask one of the older generation of military veterans), etc. The word "triage" has positively sinister connotations.
The Hound of Hell had three heads.

This dark aspect was explored at length in Chapter Four of Paul Fussell's fine book
The Great War and Modern
Memory. Fussell fills seven pages exploring the role played by threeness in the WW1 combat experience as filtered by the human
imagination.

For the poet Charles Sorley the transformation of man into corpse is a three-part action. First, man; then, when hit, animal, writhing
and thrashing in articulate agony or making horrible snoring noises; then a "thing."

The under-appreciation of three is best seen in the realm of fractions. It is possible to find a ruler marked off in thirds of an
inch — I own one — but halves and quarters are far more popular. We say "a quarter of an hour" all the time; when did you
last hear someone say "a third of an hour"?

Is there a VDARE.com-relevant angle to any of this? Of course there is!

Looking at the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Clock the other day, I found myself
wondering when
the population of our republic will reach a third of a billion. It's almost there. That day, October 6th, around noon, the clock showed 324,647,530. The
rate of increase — births minus deaths plus net immigration — was shown as one person every twelve seconds.

With 8,685,803 to go until we reach the magic number of 333,333,333, and assuming linear extrapolation, we get to a third of a billion sometime in
the late evening of January 25th, 2020 (assuming I have done my arithmetic correctly, which should by no means be relied on).

Will there be national celebration? A public holiday? Street parties? I doubt it. Thirdness gets even less respect than threeness.